I never understand those flamewars...I always use what fits for each box perfectly. I use Gentoo here, Debian on my old server, Mandrake in my office and our office server is SUSE. Each of those distro has is pro and cons. What makes Gentoo superior IMHO is not the distro, it's the nice and helpful support you get everywhere on this forum._________________Do you want your posessions identified? [ynq] (n)

In the end I'd put something like "I am ignorant that CPU unused is wasted and I can't organize my time to let my machine compile when I don't need much CPU because i.e. I'm sleeping or I'm away."

Quite right. At home, on my Gentoo box, I often start up the download/build phase right before I go to bed. And at work, on the OS X box I use, I usually start up large fink builds right before I come home for the night...it's not as if anyone else needs to use it...

I just have a hard time understanding why people whine and moan so much about the source-based installs.

This is a Transmeta Crusoe based laptop, and the reason I ever got into optimizing packages as everything is sooo slow on it - yes including debian...

When I got the laptop, last Xmas as a present from me to myself, I have found it soo slow. And I tried everything. I even rebuilt the full redhat cd (all rpms from src with the right flags, then building the install cds and installing it - yes i know i could have done it over tftp but i wanted to show off to myself...) but I still did not like it...

About then came the idea of a great linux that would be optimized...And out of a sudden urge I got hold of those domains...

Then I have found gentoo... That is almost a year ago...

Then I have forgot about those domain names (see there WAS allready a great optimized linux...)

he does have some valid points, on his site about how there are people who say its faster just because its compiled from source, but he's dead wrong about being forced to ALWAYS used untested versions of software (i dont know if it happens sometimes, never really researched the occurance) the main thing i like about portage rather than an RPM distro is that if i need to build something that doesn't have an ebuild i can just build it myself and set it up in /usr/local so that its somewhat easier to get rid of, or i can write my own ebuild (which i have yet to do succesfully). anyway the biggest reason it is usually faster is that you choose pretty much everything that gets run as a deamon with mandrake you've got to do more digging and you dont have as much flexability in adding things, thats about the same with debian, at least thats what i hear. i didnt really come from mandrake i used it for about a week and a half until i finally got sick of it and put slack back on, only to replace it with gentoo a week later.

I swear... the people who take the time to flame Gentoo with crap like "it takes so long compiling I could be <insert flame here>"

Could be what? Could be on another site talking trash about a Linux distro. Well then, don't let us use up any of your sweet time. And that dude on Slashdot posts crap ALL THE TIME.

The thing that I like about Gentoo's compiling from source rather than some kind of binary package has nothing to do with speed. It has to do with my programs being compiled against what I do or do not have on my computer. That and I'll take portage for ease of use over RPM any day of the week. Forget 1337ness, forget the faster crap... it's nice! Debian's about the only thing that comes close.

And some of us (like me) want the newest software compiled against the newest libraries. I mean geez, if that's not your thing, great. But you know what? Someone has to test the new stuff. Someone has to get the rest of the Linux world out of the glory UNIX days of the 70s and into the 21st century with something new. Someone has to use journaling filesystems as they're hot off the press and run a distro with devfs!

Honestly though, a lot of it is jealousy. The main crap on Slashdot are a bunch of losers saying that the "Gentoo crowd" thinks they're 1337er than everyone else. BS. I remember when I got started in Linux with Red Hat followed by SuSE a few years ago. I had heard about the "friendly and helpful Linux community" and tried heading over to the wonderful world of IRC to talk to them. Heh.

Does the term RTFM sound familiar? I got some of that and a lot of other people got A LOT of it. I read O'Reilly's "Running Linux", jumped ship to Slackware and used it for my servers after that. However, I was pretty bitter about the whole "friendly and helpful Linux community."

Point is, that "friendly and helpful Linux community" was a bunch of elitists. I figured that was the lot of them till I joined the Gentoo list a while back and, later, these forums. The cool thing about most of the people here is the lack of the 1337 attitude. I can ask a question that seems stupid without getting some lame ass response like "man <enter subject here>" to EVERY DAMN QUESTION.

I swear, half these ass wipes on Slashdot will say, "Linux is choice" in a flame Microsoft article and then turn around and look down their nose at people who use any distro but theirs. What the hell is up with that?

That Greenfly dude is a little too freak about his anti-Gentoo stuff. I think he'd do better to promote Mandrake more and flame Gentoo less, you know? I don't care what distro someone is using! It's a step in the right direction as long as they're not supporting MS as far as I'm concerned. Bring your Linux, bring your BSD... hell... I used to have a triple boot that shot into BeOS (and I think I'll be playing with Zeta soon, just because I can). Choice = good. Just leave it at that.

So yeah... I'm finished now._________________Repeat after me! This world is made of love and peace!

I think a lot of people need to take things less seriously. It's really embarrassing to see people get all defensive over their software. Everyone is different, with different wants and needs, and it would benefit most people to remember that. I personally found the slashdot post hilarious. A nice little shot in the arm as it were, and a reminder that you can't have everything.

All i have to say is there is a reason why I have 6 different operating systems up and running in my house right now.

as for the gentoo optimization debate, sometimes binaries are fine, but when you need specific support you have to go back to the source.
(try finding rpm's that support SMP or aalib)_________________DKP

There are 10 kinds of people in the world:
Those who understand binary and those who don't...

I think that's more accurate as to the future of things than any rage being fueled. Humans are funny like that. The real militant ones will probably start their own distro or something._________________Repeat after me! This world is made of love and peace!

People wouldn't be badmouthing Gentoo if they weren't jealous about somthing. If Gentoo wasn't, in their minds, either a serious compeditor or a real threat to their userbase, they wouldn't have any motivation to startup this distro war. This Gentoo flaming is only proof that Gentoo has really made its mark. I personally think the developers and community should, if anything, take pride in the fact that Gentoo gets this much attention. _________________GO ASASHORYU!

another one would be
"gentoo is not stable for production servers"
which is not true ofcourse

Well that fairly depends on what type of servers. Remember when you talk about servers stability and security comes first. Many machines still run on 2.2 kernel series because they're heavily tested and proven to work. And for closing security holes: You can't always wait several hours to recompile a needed service in a heavy-duty environment.

Personally I see Gentoo rather as a Desktop-oriented distribution._________________Do you want your posessions identified? [ynq] (n)

Actually I use it on my server. Mind you, it's a little web server and not some uber server or anything, but I've never had so much as a hiccup with it and I use Gentoo because it makes remote updating REALLY easy.

It also made vpopmail and qmail easy to install (which are both just a pain in the ass otherwise).

Frankly, going back to a lot of other distros is painful, particularly the way their rc scripts work. Gentoo has shaved off a lot of unecessary cruft that's connected with a time long gone by and I like it. Period.

I mean hell, I compiled everything from source on my Slackware server anyway, this just makes it easier._________________Repeat after me! This world is made of love and peace!

he had win98se installed previously , it was a 200 mHz pentium, 128mb, i took the mobo, cpu and ram from my old pc and we built this pc described above. it didn't boot from scsi , so we bought an old 4.3gig seagate hdd, and a isa soundcard.

all he wanted to do was, internetbrowsing, email, and listening to mp3s/CDs.

ok i took it to my place and tried mandrake first. the gui installation was a pain, read errors everywhere (booted from the hp burner) . ok text installation then. perfect, everything worked. rebooted, started gnome, no "connect to the internet" hmm shortcut anywhere . started kde , still nothing. since i don't know anything about serial port modems and configuration, i gave up, downloaded debian.

now debian, i thought that was one cool distro, until i tried to install it. read errors all the way, somehow i still managed to install it, X didn't want to start although everything was properly configured, i guess it's because the installer detected an agp port but no videocard in it, modem was found tho , but not the NCR scsi controller. so i said fuck it and , called a friend to bring his suse 80 to me. he showed up 30 minutes later.

suse80, gui installer, can you say read error, failed to install package xxxx do you want to see the debug messages? ... where's the textbased yast1 i know from 70 ... found the ncr , and has a nice partitioning tool, but still .. i had enough. gentoo 1.4rc4

gentoo 1.4rc4, "you want it the hard way you'll get it" . ncr scsi controlller not found... aaaack, i was ready to throw all that crap out of the window. ok relax, gentoo1.4rc2athlonxp. everything was found, but where the hell are the tarballs, locate -> counldn't find blabla/database. find -> drive busy, read error. oh wait there's a win98se cd.

meanwhile 2 days have passed. so i took the win98se cd, booted, installed, rebooted, continued installing, rebooted. done, installed drivers. everything working perfectly. took me 1 hour. well i already see it coming, in a few months he'll be knocking at my door again saying my system is fucked, can you fix it?

conclusion , don't install linux with buggy hardware, get some more background knowledge, before trying to convince someone to use linux over windows.

"Although I can't use the box at the moment because it's compiling something, as it will be for the next five days, it gives me more time to check out the latest USE flags and
potentially unstable optimisation settings."

Actually, I installed most of Gentoo from a working Linux system, if you don't have one, try KNOPPIX or the upcoming Gentoo LiveCD with Gnome and KDE. Compile in the background. Gentoo is so fast, I can do emerges for updates and new installs with multiple threads running, play an mp3, and STILL be faster than running RedHat. Under Redhat, my mp3 might skip just loading an app.

"Apart from Hello World in Pascal at school, I've never written a single program in my life or contributed to an open source project, yet staring at endless streams of GCC
output whizzing by somehow helps me contribute to international freedom."

I've written tons of code, and I often debug open-source packages with gdb to give better response to the authors and/or send in patches.

"Last month I tried to install FreeBSD on a well-supported machine, but the text-based installer scared me off. I've never used a BSD, but the guys on Slashdot say that it's l33t
though, so surely I must be for using Gentoo."

BSD? I use Linux. I tried all the BSDs, even Mach on a 386 and I own a NeXT as well. I prefer Linux.

"I've spent hours recompiling Fetchmail, X-Chat, gEdit and thousands of other programs which spend 99% of their time waiting for user input. Even though only the kernel and
glibc make a significant difference with optimisations, and RPMs and .debs can be rebuilt with a handful of commands (AND Red Hat supplies i686 kernel and glibc packages),
my box MUST be faster. It's nothing to do with the fact that I've disabled all startup services and I'm running BlackBox instead of GNOME or KDE."

I test interactive response under high load conditions. If my mp3 player doesn't skip and the system stays responsive with the system load well above 8 (on a 450 Mhz machine), then I'd say things are pretty good. While a normal system doesn't benefit from optimizing everything to death, slightly better optimization helps the system respond to "user input" in a timely manner when under high load conditions.

My custom built machine that has lasted years with no upgrades. Hand selected every component. I was going to engineer my own case, but I chose to buy a 6 fan case off-the-shelf instead.

"You Red Hat guys must get sick of dependency hell..."
"I'm too stupid to understand that circular dependencies can be resolved by specifying BOTH .rpms together on the command line, and that problems hardly ever occur if one
uses proper Red Hat packages instead of mixing SuSE, Mandrake and Joe's Linux packages together (which the system wasn't designed for)."

The new package you want is only available for RH9, but you are running 7 or 8. You tried installing the RPM from RH9 only to find out it depends on newer libraries, so you add those to the rpm command line as well, only to find out those require yet more dependencies. Before you are done, you either use --force --no-deps and get a flakey system, or you burn a RH9 CD, boot off it, and do a full system upgrade, and then start figuring out how to fix all the stuff that dies (like the apache change from RH7 to RH8 that killed mod_perl ... and I did the upgrade to RH8 just to get some other package, and realized it needed a full upgrade to stay stable). Dependency Hell!

"Constantly upgrading to the latest bleeding-edge untested software makes me more productive. Never mind the extensive testing and patching that Debian and Red Hat
perform on their packages; I've just emerged the latest GNOME beta snapshot and compiled with -O9 -fomit-instructions, and it only crashes once every few hours."

Gentoo lets me keep packages I want at "stable", "developement" or "bleeding edge", by toggling the ACCEPT_KEYWORDS for those I want developer versions of, and giving the full path to ebuilds for "bleeding edge". I get the exact system I want, and its been leagues more stable than any other distro, and I've used them all.

"OK, so no serious business is going to even consider Gentoo in the near future, and even with proper support and QA in place, it'll still eat up far too much of a company's
valuable time. But this guy I met on #animepr0n is now using it, so it must be growing!"

I worked for a company that was going to use RedHat for the servers, but we needed more security and alot of custom features, and RedHat wouldn't even compile its own kernel. After wasting tons of time, we tried Gentoo, and loved it. Serious business CAN and DID run Gentoo, and liked it so much we donated a server and bandwith.

I wouldn't recommend Gentoo for everyone, yet, but it will be much easier for new users to install and maintain as things improve, and its already become the favorite distro of THIS Unix System Admin.

As for comments about Gentoo being more productive, I had a Sparc I had to use for awhile, and it was painful .. I was swearing at it more than not (something I tend to only do with Windows). It would thrash the disk for everything! I finally said "Screw It" and installed Gentoo on it and it was like a whole new machine. Anyone else wanna try installing to an UltraSPARC? Debian can, but talk about painful, and either out of date, or unstable or both. RedHat abandoned SPARC. Not tried the SPARC version of SUSE, but in general, non-x86 releases are behind quite a bit with the major distros.

A friend of mine had Windows on his laptop and we installed Redhat .. and again, it was a whole new machine, from unusable to pleasant. After installing Gentoo over the RedHat install it was the same leap in speed and productivity. Same for my desktop. Gentoo is cheaper than new hardware, try it!